I met Dominique through Yoshi. There was a time when Yoshi got to know dozens of new people every weekend. That was in the age before my first cell phone. Dominique called me once at home and my sister was taking the call. She said Dominique called. I don’t know if I ever called back (Dominique said that I did and her brother took the call). She usually invites me to her exhibitions on very short notice (which is not true), I always show up. When I was in Paris last February, I went to see her at the Centre Culturel Suisse while she was working in the shop there. I got coffee for free, but I had to help her preventing people from stealing art books of famous Swiss artists (we failed, the shoplifters in Paris are quick bastards). That was a long introduction to say: Yes, she lives in Paris. Yes, maybe she will write in French. Once I saw her brother in Berlin in the Volksbühne when Bibiana Beglau and others were performing Berlin Alexanderplatz, put on stage by Frank Castorf. It was always the same song for five hours. And then there was this American car sliding on stage. That night, it was snowing, and there was a thunder-stroke. We hid in the Rosa-Luxemburg-Strasse. It was minus 20 degree Celsius. Dominique has many brothers. She has Hungarian roots. Hungarian is one of the very few languages you can do Hexameter the same way as in Latin. All important things come at the end of a word.

Gin and tonic and Iranian caviar

In times when people discuss the meaning and the qualities of gin and tonic on 60pages, and when Europe is outraged about the US surveillance on phone and internet communications (at least they are in France, since yesterday), my post is about some kind of combination of both … not exactly about drinks and surveillance but about food and surveillance. I read this story in an artist book by John Knight, called “COLD CUTS”: “The FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian secret agents. The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data would lead to Iranian agents in the region. The data mining operation was eventually stopped after FBI officials determined it was possibly illegal to place someone on a terrorist list because of what they ate. – Congressional Quarterly, 2007” It’s quite possible, that sometimes, Iranian caviar from the caspian sea, probably the best available, is served together with a glass of gin and tonic, probably one of the best drinks, according to 60pages … And maybe somebody is watching.